From a warning about drinking wine to cities in gridlock and a social care crisis, SARAH VINE asks why do the middle classes get blamed for everything?

NICE says that women who drink more than two glasses of wine a night should be referred for liver tests

Just in time to spoil our festive fun comes an announcement from health watchdog NICE that women who drink more than two glasses of wine a night should be referred for liver tests.

Oh dear! Something tells me that is going to be a very long queue indeed. If all the women I know who enjoy a couple of drinks with friends or their partner at the end of the day’s labours decided to take NICE up on its advice, there would be NHS gridlock.

More to the point, if all those self-same women gave up on ‘wine-o-clock’, divorce rates would go through the roof. The birth rate would fall off a cliff. And what little spark of joy people have to look forward to after battling their way home or finally getting their tiny tyrants (sorry, ‘bundles of joy’) to loosen their grip on consciousness, would be extinguished.

I’m sure I speak for millions when I say that you can take away our cigarettes, you can take away our fizzy drinks and calorie-laden double mocha.

We will even, since you insist, participate in at least half an hour’s strenuous (and humiliating) exercise twice a week — but please, Nice, in the name of all that is holy, do not take away our wine.

In a culture so devoid of fun, so laden with notions of austerity, where the majority are, as the Prime Minister puts it, only ‘just about managing’, where so many struggle to afford a decent-sized house or a proper holiday and where so many of us face pressure from all sides, there has to be some release.

And besides, wine is the opium of the middle classes. Those in power should be grateful that we’re tucked up on the sofa sipping our glasses of soothing grape juice and not picketing Whitehall about the Government’s failure to stand up to strikers or divert foreign aid millions to look after our elderly.

And it’s not as if we’re drinking ourselves into a stupor night after night. Just enough to take the edge off the day. Two glasses. Maybe three if it’s been a stinker.

Not so much that we can’t put the cat out and remember to clean our teeth before lights out.

Cities in gridlock have also been blames on parents wanting to take their children to school in safety. Stock image

In any case, it’s ludicrous to think that the biggest problem facing the NHS is ladies with a mild Shiraz habit. As opposed to, for example, the £30 million lost annually in health tourism. Or the vast amounts squandered on giving women unnecessary boob jobs, providing over-priced translation services for foreign patients or paying over-the-odds for drugs.

But then this announcement, as with so many others, is not really about helping patients or relieving the burden on the NHS.

It’s about shifting the blame for the incompetence that characterises so many of our rotten institutions onto those who are always left holding the baby: the tax-paying middle classes.

Why are we always to blame — and why are we always expected to pick up the tab?

RELATED ARTICLES

Share this article

Share

Housing crisis? That’ll be our fault for being NIMBYs and refusing to let our green and pleasant land become a giant housing estate so we can accommodate the millions of people Tony Blair invited here without bothering to ask us.

Cities in gridlock? Our fault for wanting to drive our chidlren to school in safety, and nothing to do with the empty cycle lanes that have reduced so many cities to huge exhaust-emitting car parks.

Social care crisis? Let’s make people sell their precious, hard-won homes to pay for care instead of stemming the millions in aid we give to the rising economic powerhouses China and India.

Postal and rail strikes? Don’t worry, the middle classes will be stoic, like they always are.

Now, pass me that bottle . . .

Why is every fitness range on the market designed for the already hyper-toned and super slim? Surely it should be the other way round.

Even M&S’s range is all cropped tops, sleeveless vests and thigh-skimming leggings — and their average customer is a size 16. Someone should design a range for fat people aiming to get thin.

Fat Girl Slim, they could call it. Maybe then those New Year’s resolutions might last beyond Valentine’s Day.

Greatest gift of Christmas

Why do we persist in the belief that Christmas is ‘the most wonderful time of the year’? Stressful, yes. Expensive, for sure. Depressing, very possibly.

But wonderful? Surely only for dreamers and children.

This year, the wonder feels in even shorter supply than usual. How can we celebrate with greedy abandon when there is so much suffering?

And yet it is precisely because we live in such troubled times that Christmas is so important.

Because once you strip away the tinsel and tat, what remains is the one thing that humanity needs now more than ever: hope. The story of the birth of Christ (whether you take it literally or not) is a reminder of that inexhaustible well that sustains us all. With each new human life comes a chance to make it all right, to forgive, forget and move on.

It is the greatest gift of all.

Prize for the worst Christmas charity single goes to the Labour MPs protesting against employers cutting overtime pay. To the tune of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas?, the MPs rant against injustice in retail. But what about injustice on the railways? Thanks to the chaos instigated by Aslef president Tosh McDonald, some commuters no longer even have jobs. McDonald earns £128,000 a year. ‘We know that they have plenty/ But still they give us less and less/Stand up against the greed this Christmas time,’ sing the MPs. Mr McDonald, are you listening?

Thanks to the chaos instigated by Aslef president Tosh McDonald, some commuters no longer even have jobs

I wrote last week about the power of the transgender lobby — and now the cover star of January’s National Geographic is a nine-year-old trans child called Avery Jackson. She’s pictured with pink hair and pink clothes, and, according to her mother Debi, ‘proclaimed her true identity’ at four, saying she was a boy on the outside, but a girl inside.

On this evidence, Debi decided this ‘was not a phase’ and encouraged her son to live as a girl.

Avery now says: ‘The best thing about being a girl is that I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.’

The cover star of January’s National Geographic is a nine-year-old trans child called Avery Jackson

I really hope for her sake that this is true. But watching the testimony of her American mother — who’s part of a lobby group called Moms for Transgender Equality — on the internet, it was clear that she was very much part of the process.

Indeed, she almost wore her role in her child’s new gender as a badge of pride. I do think there is a genuine political agenda here; and I do think some children are the victims.

Only time will tell whether little Avery really does want to be a girl or whether — as young children will — she’s just mirroring her mother’s beliefs. One thing is for sure, though: if her mum is wrong, it won’t be her life that will be wrecked.

So Christine Lagarde, boss of the IMF, is found guilty of corrupt activities, but gets to stay in her job. Why is this news? Show me a French politician who isn’t on the make and I’ll show you a set of hen’s teeth.

Post truth balderdash

The Left’s latest buzz phrase is ‘post truth’; as in ‘we’re now living in a post truth age’.

They define this as a world ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. According to this analysis, Brexit was a post-truth event, as was the election of Donald Trump.

The BBC now uses it to describe everything it doesn’t like, from Nigel Farage to the rise of populism.

How about we just call it by its real name? Democracy.

Watching Celebrity Mastermind last night, not only were none of the contestants actual celebrities, the winner — TV presenter Piers Taylor — didn’t know the answer to the question ‘Who said: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”’ I imagine he thinks Churchill is a nodding dog.

Look in the mirror Mariah

We all know Mariah Carey has a peerless voice, but I’m starting to wonder whether, aged 46, she needs to get her eyesight checked.

Either that or she’s got one of those mirrors you find in upmarket shops that make you look much thinner than you really are in order to encourage you to part with money for over-priced clothes that are clearly a size too small.

All I can say is I hope those safety pins are reinforced.

We all know Mariah Carey has a peerless voice, but many are starting to wonder whether, aged 46, she needs to get her eyesight checked